Yes, the GTK+ theme and the icon themes are different between both
screenshots, that's the only real difference. You should be able to find
a GTK+ 3 theme that looks less horrible than the Adwaita theme
you are
using (can recommend Arc, Ceti-2, Greybird, Libra, and Numix).
You
should also be able to use the same icon theme for both versions
(the
one in GTK+2 screenshot looks like the default KDE4 one).
Yep, it's Oxygen. I've not had a chance to check out many other themes at work, but I will.
The only thing you can't fix with themes is some of the dialogs like open/save/font/colour/etc, some of which will use the new toy/touch-friendly dialogs from GTK+3.
That's good to hear. Personal preferences are indeed personal, but I've never been a fan of the Big Flat Look. :-) Clearlooks, etc. is just about right for me.
The default build of Geany is against GTK+ 2. If you can't find a package for your distro, you could build it from source, it's relatively straightforward (see official docs/README/etc).
I've built Geany a time or two in past and will do it again if I can't locate a suitable binary package. Seems like last time I ran into some libraries that weren't found, but I can work through that if it happens again. Thanks for the quick response.
